Mother arrested after leaving baby to bake in hot car while getting her hair done

A Georgia woman reportedly tried to cover up her one-year-old baby’s death after she found her dead in her car last month.

Dijanelle Fowler, 25, left her daughter Skylar alone in the vehicle at 10:04am on June 15 while she visited a hair salon, WSB-TV Atlanta reports.

It is understood while she had left the air conditioning on, the battery soon drained, leaving the infant to perish in the extreme heat.

Security cameras captured Fowler returning to the car at 4pm. However, rather than call police upon finding her baby's body, she allegedly covered her child with clothes before asking a man from the salon to help her jump start her car.

Fowler then drove to the Emory University Hospital where she placed an anonymous call to emergency services from the car park, reporting an unconscious woman.

When police turned up, they found Fowler playing dead in the car alongside her daughter. At the time, Captain Jerry A. Lewis from Dekalb County Police Department's homicide squad said they believed Fowler had a seizure, and that her daughter had died during the time her mother was unconscious.

"Between 4 and 4:54 (p.m.) she texted the child's godfather that she was going to go to an urgent care for headaches," a detective wrote in the police report. "(Fowler) also Googled about signs of seizures."

After finding holes in her story, detectives investigated further and reached the conclusion Fowler had been driving around with her dead baby in the car before making it to hospital.

"We believe the child was deceased in the vehicle already, however she did not disclose any of these details to us," Lewis told WSB-TV Atlanta.

A medical examiner backed up the hypothesis, confirming that the baby had been dead for much longer than Fowler's claims.

With enough evidence to arrest the suspicious mother, detectives found that she had skipped town in early July. After visiting South Carolina, New Jersey and Florida, Fowler turned herself in to authorities on Monday.

Image: Dekalb County Police Department

Fowler is now in custody at the Dekalb County Jail where she has been charged with second-degree murder, second-degree cruelty to children and concealing death.